Page:History of the United States of America, Spencer, v1.djvu/41

, thus indicating the long continued influence of a southern climate. The number of syllables in the Cherokee is very limited—a circumstance of which an uninstructed but ingenious member of that tribe recently availed himself to invent a syllabic alphabet, by means of which the Cherokee is written and read with great facility. Of the ancient state of the wandering tribes of the prairies west of the Mississippi little is known; but the Dacotah or Sioux, still spoken in a great variety of dialects, has been probably for centuries the prevailing language of that region. The Catawbas, who have left their name to a river of Carolina, and who once occupied a wide adjacent territory; the Uchees, on the Savannah, subjects of the Creeks; the Natchez, a small confederacy on the Lower Mississippi, in the midst of the Choctaws, appear to have spoken peculiar languages; and no doubt, there were other similar cases. Of the dialects west of the Rocky Mountains hardly anything is known."

Mr. Schoolcraft, in a very interesting paper read before the "New York Historical Society," November, 1846, attributes to the Red Race who inhabited the Continent of America, in the equinoctial latitudes, a very great antiquity, so great indeed, as to be inclined to think that they might have reached the Continent within five hundred years of the original dispersion. That they were of the Shemitic stock, too, can hardly be questioned. Civilization, government, and arts, began to develop themselves in the tropical regions of Mexico and Central America. Mexico, like Rome of old, seems to have been invaded by one tribe of barbarians after another, who in the end, as in the case of Rome, were meliorated and modified by that civilization which they came to destroy. Such was probably the origin of the Toltecs, and the Aztecs, whom Cortez subdued.

Turning our view from this ancient centre of power, to the latitudes of the American Republic, we find there, at the opening of the sixteenth century, various tribes, of divers languages, existing in the mere hunter state, or at most, with some habits of horticulture superadded. They had neither cattle nor arts. They were bowmen and spearmen—roving and predatory, with very little, if anything, in their traditions, to link them to these prior central families of man, but with nearly everything in their physical and intellectual type, to favor such a generic affiliation. They erected groups of mounds, to sacrifice to the sun, moon, and stars. They were, originally, fire-worshippers. They spoke general class of transpositive languages. They had instruments of copper, as well as of silex, and porphyries. They made cooking-vessels of tempered clay. They cultivated the most important of all the ancient Mexican grains, the zea mays. They raised the tobacco plant, and used the Aztec drum in religious ceremonies and war-dances. They believed in the oriental doctrines of transformation, and the power of necromancy, and they were largely in